Dialog. The focal point of any movie, television show, documentary, or for that matter, any creative media production involving the spoken word. Add to the mix a sweeping musical score, dozens of foley effects, and plenty more – and it becomes clear the job of dialog mixing is a tall order. After all, if you can’t hear what the actors are saying, why watch it at all!!

The SA-2 Dialog Processor is based on hardware originally conceived by Academy Award winning re-recording mixer Mike Minkler and used on over 100 major motion pictures. The SA-2 is designed to improve the overall sound of recorded speech. But the SA-2 is not just for dialog. It’s equally useful for vocals, and is a great tool for adjusting the timbre of any track, a reliable de-esser, and a fine multi-frequency compressor, in our completely biased opinion.

The SA-2 Dialog Processor is made up of 5 bands of strategic active equalization, configured in a variety of modes to best address common issues of dialog. Each band of active equalization has a threshold control to determine at what signal level the active equalizer begins to effect the signal. There are also enable buttons for each band to quickly audition the effect of any given band. Two mode selectors – one for controlling the ballistics of the active equalization, and a second for placing the five bands at strategic locations in the frequency spectrum. Finally, there are input and output gain controls for overall adjustment.

Andres, thanks for pointing this out. Watched the demo and another review/demo. This plugin clearly makes an audible difference even with a casual listen to the end result and with the quick workflow makes this a tempting purchase.

heisenberg wrote:This plugin clearly makes an audible difference even with a casual listen to the end result and with the quick workflow makes this a tempting purchase.

If you do demo it, on dialogue, adjust the threshold so all five bands are doing something.
When I initially tried the plugin I used it as a "preset" de-esser adjusting only one band at a time.
I don't think that's the way it supposed to work.

Just put it on the dialogue master and make sure all five bands are 10-50% (-ish) orange... you're done :-)

Slightly odd video that though, the demo. Immediately I thought "what's wrong with the narrator's voice?" It sounds kinda muffled to me and lacking in richness, a bit like it was recorded on a dynamic mic and not a condenser. Maybe it's my age and my ears, but the interview with Mike Minkler sounded fine. But that's a very awkward problem to have on a video about improving dialogue.

Honestly and truly, I didn't hear any terrific results either in the dialogue processing. Its a dynamic EQ, right? The results sounded like pretty sublte eq and de-essing. It did sound more impressive on the female vocal, ironically (given that it was seemingly designed for spoken word not sung) - to my ears that more obviously with one click made it sound "better".